America's secret drone war in Africa

More secret bases. More and better unmanned warplanes. More
frequent and deadly robotic attacks. Some five years after a US
Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle flew the type's first mission over
lawless Somalia, the shadowy American-led drone campaign in the
Horn of Africa is targeting Islamic militants more ruthlessly than
ever.

Thanks to media accounts, indirect official statements,
fragmentary crash reports and one complaint by a UN monitoring
group, we can finally begin to define -- however vaguely -- the
scope and scale of the secret African drone war.

The details that follow are in part conjecture,
albeit informed conjecture. They outline of
just one of America's ongoing shadow
wars -- and one possible model for the future US way of
war. Along with the counterterrorism campaigns in Pakistan, Yemen
and the Philippines, the Somalia drone war demonstrates how
high-tech US forces can inflict major damage on America's enemies
at relatively low cost … and without most US citizens having any
idea it's even happening.

In an escalating secret war, drones are doing an ever-greater
proportion of the American fighting.

The drones are coming
It wasn't until relatively recently that US drones were
permanently stationed in East Africa. The military and CIA have
operated armed versions of General Atomics' one-tonne Predator
since 2001, but early on the remote-controlled warplanes were in
high demand and short supply. Afghanistan and later Iraq
monopolized the drones.

That was a big problem for the small US force in East Africa
struggling to keep tabs on increasingly radical, and dangerous,
Somali militants. "The largest gap is knowledge," Navy Rear Adm.
Tony Kurta, former commander of US troops in Djibouti, told
Wired.com's Danger Room in 2009.

In 2003, Joint Special Operations Command resorted to spending
six months sneaking US Navy Seals into Somalia by submarine to
painstakingly plant disguised surveillance cameras -- all to
capture just a fraction of the images a drone could acquire in a
single mission.

The drone shortage represented a huge risk for CIA agents
attempting to build an intelligence network for tracking suspected
terrorists in Somalia. The agency used cash payments to Somali
warlords as a "carrot" to draw them to the American side. US air
power was supposed to be the "stick" that helped motivate the
Somalis. But for years the intel agency didn't actually possess any
stick. So it lied, telling the warlords there were drones overhead
when in fact there weren't.

It took a surprise -- and ultimately
doomed -- invasion of Somalia by regional power Ethiopia
to open the door for a stronger US presence in East Africa.
American commandos followed along behind the Ethiopian tank
columns as side-firing AC-130 gunships provided lethal top
cover.

Where once the small US force in East Africa had relied mostly
on a single large base in Djibouti, just north of Somalia, in the
wake of the Ethiopian blitz American bases sprouted across
the region. The CIA and American security contractors set up
shop alongside a UN-backed peacekeeping force at the shell-crated
international airport in Mogadishu. American contractors quietly
carved a secret airstrip out of a
forest in Arba Minch, Ethiopia. Under the guise of
tracking Somali pirates, the Pentagon negotiated permission to base
people and planes on the Indian Ocean island nation of the
Seychelles.

Soon all these bases would support drone aircraft being churned
out at an accelerating rate by the US aerospace industry. In 2003
the US military possessed only a handful of Pioneer, Predator and
other drones. After spending around $5 billion (£3.2 billion)
annually, year after year, by 2012 America's robotic arsenal had
swelled to 678 large and medium
drones and no fewer than 3,000 small,
hand-launched Ravens.

Some of each were destined for Somalia, where the CIA and
Pentagon were advancing plans for a far-reaching, but subtle,
campaign to defeat militants and prop up a fledgling, UN-backed
government. It was a campaign that, in stark contrast to the
occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, would not include any large,
permanent American ground forces. American CIA agents, mercenaries,
commandos and drones would provide intelligence, training, raiding
prowess and air cover while Ethiopian, Ugandan and Kenyan troops
did most of the day-to-day fighting inside Somalia.